UWSpace is currently experiencing technical difficulties resulting from its recent migration to a new version of its software. These technical issues are not affecting the submission and browse features of the site. UWaterloo community members may continue submitting items to UWSpace. We apologize for the inconvenience, and are actively working to resolve these technical issues.
 

Localising Information in Bandlimited Quantum Field Theory

Thumbnail Image

Files

Pye_Jason.pdf (3.67 MB)

Date

2015-09-24

Authors

Pye, Jason

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University of Waterloo

Abstract

A deeply-held belief in fundamental physics is that interactions must happen locally. Despite the great success of local models, there are many indications that locality must be abandoned in a theory of quantum gravity. For example, this nonlocality may appear as a minimum length or an ultraviolet cutoff at the Planck scale. But without a full theory of quantum gravity, can we model the effect that this nonlocality may have on sub-Planckian physics? In this work, we study a model for an ultraviolet cutoff based on Shannon's sampling theorem of classical information theory. We apply the sampling theorem to quantum field theory, which results in the ability to represent fields on a lattice without breaking Euclidean symmetries. After building up the bandlimited quantum field theory, we study the locality and entanglement of its degrees of freedom. We find that each degree of freedom occupies an incompressible volume of space, on the order of the Planck scale in size.

Description

Keywords

Quantum Field Theory, Sampling Theory, Entanglement, Entropy, Locality, Quantum Gravity, Information Theory

LC Keywords

Citation

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10012/9700

Collections

Theses
Applied Mathematics